Lowering the Bar

Clinton and Women

President Clinton’s sordid entanglements with Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, and now Monica Lewinsky have drawn barely a squeak of protest from the powerful writers, lawyers, activists, politicians, and academics who call themselves feminists. As they struggle with fresh allegations from Kathleen Willey, the author reveals some ugly truths about the women’s movement and the commander in chief.

Okay, class, let’s review: The man in question has been sued for sexual harassment over an episode that allegedly included dropping his trousers to waggle his erect penis at a woman who held a $6.35-an-hour clerical job in the state government over which he presided. Another woman has charged that when she asked him for a job he invited her into his private office, fondled her breasts, and placed her hand on his crotch. A third woman confided to friends that when she was a 21-year-old intern she began an affair with the man—much older, married, and the head of the organization whose lowliest employee she was. Actually, it was less an affair than a service contract, in which she allegedly dashed into his office, when summoned, to perform oral sex on him. After their liaison was revealed, he denied everything, leaving her to be portrayed as a tramp and a liar. Or, in his own words, “that woman.”

Let us not even mention the former lover who was steered to a state job; or the law-enforcement officers who say the man used them to solicit sexual partners for him; or his routine use of staff members, lawyers, and private investigators to tar the reputation of any woman who tries to call him to account for his actions.

Can you find the problems with his behavior? Take your time: these problems are apparently of an order so subtle as to escape the notice of many of the smartest women in America—the writers, lawyers, activists, officeholders, and academics who call themselves feminists.

When news broke that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr was investigating whether President Clinton had lied under oath about his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, or encouraged others to lie, the cacophony that ensued was notable for the absence of one set of voices: the sisterly chorus that backed up Anita Hill seven years ago when her charges of sexual harassment nearly stopped Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

With very few exceptions, feminists were either silent or dismissive this time. “If anything, it sounds like she put the moves on him,” said Susan Faludi, author of Backlash. Betty Friedan weighed in, but only to huff her outrage that Clinton’s “enemies are attempting to bring him down through allegations about some dalliance with an intern…. Whether it’s a fantasy, a set-up or true, I simply don’t care.”

It was not until former White House volunteer Kathleen Willey appeared on 60 Minutes in mid-March to make public the allegation she had formerly made in a deposition—that Clinton had manhandled her during a private meeting in which she sought a paying job—that some feminists began to make reluctant noises of dismay. The National Organization for Women (NOW), which until then had found itself “unable to comment responsibly,” averred that “Kathleen Willey’s sworn testimony moves the question from whether the president is a ‘womanizer’ to whether he is a sexual predator.”

But NOW’s change of heart was by no means typical of feminist activists. Many others hung tough. Anita Perez Ferguson, president of the National Women’s Political Caucus—the premier group promoting female participation in American politics—described Willey’s charges as “quantity rather than quality, in terms of my feelings.” She continued, “There’s no question that it’s disturbing…. But to come to any judgment now is definitely not something that I think is timely.”

With the exception of a few Republicans, women in Congress—including several swept to power by female outrage over the Senate’s treatment of Anita Hill—have shown an equal agility of mind. Their excuses range from the procedural stonewall (“What is important for the American people to know is that there is a process in place to deal with these allegations,” in the words of Senator Barbara Boxer) to the creative inversion (What about Ken Starr’s “humiliation” of the women he dragged before the grand jury?, fumed Representative Nancy Pelosi) to the truly fanciful twist on gender politics (“Not so many years ago, a woman couldn’t be a White House intern,” said a straight-faced Senator Carol Moseley-Braun on Meet the Press).

My own sampling of feminist opinion found women offering an astonishing array of strategies for avoiding the elephant in the living room:

See no evil … “It will be a great pity if the Democratic Party is damaged by this,” the feminist writer Anne Roiphe told me. “That’s been my response from the very beginning—I just wanted to close my eyes, and wished it would go away.”

Hear no evil … “We do not know what happened in the Lewinsky case,” said Kathy Rodgers, executive director of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. “The only thing that is clear is that the facts are not clear.”

Speak no evil … “We’re trying to think of the bigger picture, think about what’s best for women,” said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation.

If the hypocrisy and the powers of denial are impressive, one must consider that these women have had a lot of practice. Feminists have all along muffled, disguised, excused, and denied the worst aspects of the president’s behavior with women—especially in their reactions to Paula Jones, whose sexual-harassment suit they have greeted with attitudes ranging from tepid boilerplate support to outright hostility.

In the Lewinsky case, it has fallen to their enemies to state the obvious. “The C.E.O. of a corporation wouldn’t have had time to pack up his briefcase before he was fired for this,” says Barbara Ledeen, executive director for policy at the Independent Women’s Forum, the Washington-based group that has achieved a certain cachet for its condemnations of traditional feminism.

“The president should be setting some sort of example in the workplace,” says the outrageous libertarian writer Camille Paglia, who has gained prominence in part for denouncing liberal feminists. “That’s all I’m talking about. In. The. Workplace…. Since when did the president use the interns as a dessert cart? ‘Mmmmm, she looks good!’ When did that become okay?”

The chief reason for feminists’ continued support of Clinton is clear: Clinton is their guy. Clarence Thomas was their enemy. Bob Packwood, a liberal Republican who was the next habitual boor to walk the plank, was a harder case for feminists, but in the end they tied the blindfold. Clinton, though, is the hardest case, because he is the most reliably supportive president they’ve ever had.

But if political opportunism is the main cause of their current blindness, it’s not the only one. And it’s worth examining all the reasons in detail. For you can find in them a road map to everything that ails liberal feminism today: political self-dealing, class bias, and dedication to a bleak vision of sexual “liberation” that has deprived them of what was once the moral force of their beliefs.

Feminists are quick to say that any charges of hypocrisy lodged against them are the work of the anti-Clinton right. “It’s a twofer for them,” says Smeal. “If they can get the president, great. And if they can get feminism, even greater.”

So it seems appropriate to say here that I am a feminist and a registered Democrat. Many of the feminist activists in Washington are women I’ve known for years as sources; I feel an open sympathy for much of the work they do. Yet I also feel something close to fury over their failure to call Clinton to account for his actions. My anger may be bred, in part, by my own past willingness to “put in perspective” Clinton’s questionable behavior with women—enough, at least, to vote for him twice. I can’t defend my own past complicity, but I can say that what follows is not the brief of a practiced Clinton hater.

To be sure, it is possible to find a reason, consistent with at least some brand of feminism, to dismiss every allegation that has been made against President Clinton. Monica Lewinsky was apparently an eager partner. Paula Jones has allied herself with right-wingers who never before gave the first damn about the victims of sexual harassment, and as a legal matter her case is, at best, borderline: even if the facts are exactly as she states them, it’s a stretch to interpret them as violations of the laws under which she is suing. In the case of Kathleen Willey, there are the usual ambiguities surrounding any episode that comes down to she says/he says, and evidence—mitigating, in some people’s eyes—that she continued to seek favors from him after the episode she describes. The White House, in fact, broke its otherwise stony silence to besiege reporters with detailed catalogues of the many friendly notes Willey had written to the president since 1993.

In each woman’s case, there is enough we don’t know to support a respectable claim of ignorance. The individual pieces of the Clinton saga are complex, snaky things with their own tawdry confusions. But these are precisely the complications that Clinton has capitalized on. The truth is that, while a lot of the facts are murky, enough of them are clear. We have good evidence, for example, that Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, had a state trooper escort Paula Jones to his suite at Little Rock’s Excelsior Hotel during her work hours, and we know that she gave contemporaneous accounts of the meeting to several witnesses which closely track the allegations in her lawsuit. We know that there is extensive evidence of a relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky that has not been challenged by the administration. We know that Arkansas state troopers have said under oath that Clinton used them to enable his sexual escapades in Little Rock. And we know that Clinton has lied about his past behavior—including the sizable lie that underlay the supposedly informed decision of the American people that they didn’t care about his womanizing: his elaborately careful 1992 denials of his affair with Gennifer Flowers.

Where America’s women leaders have failed is in their unwillingness to draw even the most commonsensical conclusions from the evidence of Clinton’s recklessness. Instead, they have taken refuge in legalisms. In the words of an “alert” posted on the feminist Women Leaders Online Web site, “Men acting like pigs is not against the law; if it were, many women in America could be zillionaires.”

But since when did feminists see their mission as defining and denouncing only that which is illegal? Didn’t the phrase “men acting like pigs” once describe a fair portion of what feminists were trying to change? Clearly the Monica Lewinsky scandal is not a case of illegal sexual harassment. But if Clinton had the relationship with her that the available evidence suggests he had, it flew in the face of the law’s spirit and reasoning: among other things, by potentially penalizing all the interns with whom he did not have affairs.

In their sudden and exclusive reverence for the law, feminists have jeopardized some of their greatest achievements. And what their elaborate excuses ignore is that they could play an important role in securing the facts they find so lamentably scarce: women are a crucial constituency for the Clinton administration, and if feminists were to demand answers from Clinton as vociferously as they demanded a Senate hearing for Anita Hill, we might all be closer to penetrating the White House’s wall of silence.

It’s plain enough why feminists want to keep Clinton in office. He is pro-choice; he signed into law the Family and Medical Leave Act, which had been vetoed twice by a Republican president; he favors affirmative action, which benefits women more than any ethnic group in the country; he has made child care a policy priority this year. According to the Center for the American Woman and Politics, Clinton has appointed 10 of the 21 women who have served in Cabinet-level positions, including the first woman ever to be secretary of state or attorney general. And he appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court.

While most of the Washington-based women’s organizations that lobby and promote women’s participation in electoral politics maintain a veneer of bipartisanship, a web of relationships links them to the Clinton administration. White House Communications director Ann Lewis, who has been one of Clinton’s fiercest defenders on television, was once the chair of the Democratic Task Force of the National Women’s Political Caucus. Anita Perez Ferguson, who is now president of the caucus, formerly worked in the Clinton administration, as a White House liaison for the Transportation Department, and at the Democratic National Committee.

And then there’s friendship: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s friendships, in particular, may have neutralized some of the women who might otherwise be criticizing Clinton. When I called Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, who chairs the (theoretically bipartisan) Women’s Campaign Fund, her assistant cheerfully told me, “I know that Marjorie has not made any comments about recent”—here he stopped and groped for a word—”events? Just because she is friends with Hillary.” When women activists were charging up the hill to oppose the nominations of Thomas and other conservative Reagan-Bush appointees, one of their comrades-in-arms was Melanne Verveer, then the chief lobbyist for the liberal organization People for the American Way, now the First Lady’s chief of staff.

It’s interesting to note that feminist investment in Clinton has grown over time, even as the allegations about his sexual behavior have increased. During Clinton’s first campaign, women activists were suspicious of the “New Democratic” elements of his agenda. To this day, they remain angry at him for signing into law the radical welfare revisions of 1996, which overwhelmingly affect poor women.

But with that exception, there has been a sea change in their attitudes toward him. For one thing, after the congressional elections of 1994, they saw him as all they had standing between them and Newt Gingrich. For another, the 1996 election marked the first time the gender gap exceeded a president’s margin of victory, and suddenly feminists had, in Clinton, a poster boy for the theory on which they had long based their claims to power. (Never mind that a scant minority of the women voters in question were voting on “feminist” issues; most were moderates who liked what Clinton had to say on education, jobs, and crime.) At last, feminists felt that they had some real leverage with the White House, and they’re loath to give it up now.

Only a decade ago, a single liaison with a woman to whom he had no professional connection squashed Gary Hart’s career like a bug. Yet today Clinton is accused of traducing every boundary we have uneasily set around sex in the workplace, and Americans—especially American women—reply with a yawn. “Men are legitimately perplexed,” says Katie Roiphe, the 29-year-old feminist writer who has made a specialty of critiquing feminist alarmism about date rape and sexual harassment. “They’re thinking, ‘Wait a minute—we weren’t even supposed to compliment someone on her hairstyle two years ago or we’d get thrown out of office. And Bill Clinton is allowed to have this 21-year-old servicing him, with blow jobs or whatever, and women support him overwhelmingly?’ ”

The support of Clinton, she believes, shows “a reaction against the kind of sexual correctness of the early 90s. And in some sense Bill Clinton is fulfilling a sort of secret fantasy of a lot of American women, of this kind of old-fashioned, virile man.”

She may be overstating the case among women voters, who at this point give Clinton “favorable” ratings only about 6 percent higher than his ratings among men. It is still possible that women will turn against Clinton. (Memo to pollsters: Keep your eye on soccer moms, who may eventually tire of trying to explain oral sex to their nine-year-olds.)

But Roiphe is onto something—a shift in elite opinion about both Clinton and sexual mores. Exhibit A was a bizarre January 30 gathering hosted by The New York Observer at the restaurant Le Bernardin, where 10 Manhattan “supergals”—including writers Katie Roiphe, Erica Jong, Nancy Friday, and Francine Prose, designer Nicole Miller, former Saturday Night Live contributor Patricia Marx, and “retired dominatrix and writer” Susan Shellogg—were invited to drink wine and analyze the scandal.

The resulting exchange, published by the Observer in the February 9 issue, was galactically strange. The women agreed that they liked Clinton better for having had a titillating affair; after all, he’s kind of a hunk. Jong, for one, wants a president who is “alive from the waist down,” and Marx declared him “cute and getting cuter all the time.” They pronounced Kenneth Starr (in Friday’s words) “a big sissy,” and speculated about whether Lewinsky had swallowed the president’s semen. “Oh,” squealed Jong, “imagine swallowing the Presidential come.”

It was the most embarrassing thing I had read in a long time. But then I opened the next week’s New Yorker, which contained a swooning “Fax from Washington” written by Tina Brown herself, describing the February 5 White House dinner for British prime minister Tony Blair. The subtext was that the Clinton scandal had marvelously improved the president’s aura: it made him seem so … hot. “Now see your President, tall and absurdly debonair, as he dances with a radiant blonde, his wife…. Amid the clichés about his charm, his glamour is undersung…. Forget the dog-in-the-manger, down-in-the-mouth neo-puritanism of the op-ed tumbrel drivers, and see him instead as his guests do: a man in a dinner jacket with more heat than any star in the room.”

This is precisely the sort of retro whipped cream that feminists are supposed to be able to see through; once upon a time, they construed it as their job to help the rest of us do the same. But these days, feminists—the famous feminists, that is; the mainstream feminists; the ones who are called up by newspaper reporters and TV stations—are an established part of the country’s elites: the media elite in New York, the political elite in Washington. And this is one of the major reasons they have failed to hold Clinton’s feet to the fire.

As has been noted elsewhere, class dynamics, almost as much as politics, drove the differing reactions to Anita Hill and Paula Jones. Hill was a well-spoken, Yale-educated lawyer; Jones was of the lower middle class. Women’s groups were probably not as apt to dismiss her out of simple class bias as was the press: many, if not most, of the sexual-harassment victims feminists support are of working-class background. But when they decided, for other reasons, to keep their distance from her, her Ozark roots made her an easy woman to ignore.

Kathleen Willey’s emergence has further clarified the class dynamics of Clinton’s feminist support. Other factors may have made her more credible than Paula Jones—her reluctance to come forward, for example. But it was surely not a coincidence that some feminists saw the light only when confronted with a gorgeous, mature woman whose voice, clothes, makeup, and manner all gave off the vibes of the upper-middle-class suburbanite. (Lewinsky, as a child of Beverly Hills, belongs to an economic class closer to Willey’s than Jones’s. But in status terms—the terms that matter in the East Coast elites—she is irretrievably tacky, a creature from an Aaron Spelling show.)

The elitism inherent in the Clintons’ own feminism was apparent from the very first weeks of the administration, when yuppie lawyer Zoe Baird saw her nomination for attorney general derailed over the issue of her having both employed two illegal nannies and failed to pay the requisite Social Security taxes. All the brilliant attorneys involved in preparing Baird for her confirmation had overlooked the fact that this might be an enraging issue to the chumps who couldn’t afford nannies of any nationality, yet paid all the personal and business taxes they owed.

“They think only bluestockings are worth paying attention to,” says the conservative writer Lisa Schiffren, a former speechwriter for Dan Quayle, about Clintonian feminism. “You know, important women with important careers and day-care needs…. Clearly this is a bunch of Wellesley girls saying that Wellesley girls and Yale graduates are worth fighting for, and high-school grads and hairdressers and lounge singers can be destroyed.”

In easing past the contradictions of the feminist class system, Hillary Clinton is the crucial figure. It’s common knowledge that she has been her husband’s most important protector. “The fact that Hillary doesn’t seem bothered by it gives women an excuse, in a way, to be tolerant of his behavior,” says Radcliffe Public Policy Institute fellow Wendy Kaminer.

But less appreciated is a second, more subtle way in which Hillary has shielded her husband. She is, in effect, his feminist beard: the symbolic guarantor of his political bona fides. He may hit on women like Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones, her presence says, but when it came to sharing a home (and a presidency), he chose a woman like me. Again and again, feminists cite the Hillary factor as mitigating evidence. Gloria Steinem told me, “He’s married to a woman who’s at least his equal, whom he clearly likes and respects.” This apparently makes it okay that when he chooses a sex partner he’s looking—in the words of a former Clinton staffer—“for a dopey girl who’s not going to make him send flowers.”

In some ways, it’s baffling that feminists can still argue seriously that one Hillary trumps a multitude of Monicas. Even leaving aside Clinton’s repeated public humiliations of his wife, she’s always been a dubious feminist heroine: after all, she married her power, and in the White House she has wielded it without accountability. In truth, there’s an awful affront to women in the apparently sharp distinctions that Clinton draws between the kind of woman you marry and the kind of woman you seek out for pleasure. We were supposed to be doing away with the Madonna and the whore—or at least trying to integrate them.

In for a penny, in for a pound: having decided to renew Clinton’s grant of immunity once the Lewinsky scandal broke, feminists weren’t in any position to fire so much as a warning shot across the bow when the White House began gingerly trashing her reputation. Not when a key congressional ally, Charles Rangel, questioned whether she “played with a full deck.” Not even when Clinton himself ran one of the oldest plays in the old-boy playbook, pounding the table and declaring, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” That woman. You know, his tone said, that crazy woman, that fantasist, that lying home wrecker.

Far from protesting, many feminists have piled on. “Does anyone really care if young Monica found an interesting new position at the White House?” wrote Judy Mann, The Washington Post’s feminist columnist. She chided the press for not giving sufficient weight to the possibility that Lewinsky was embellishing her relationship with a celebrity just for attention—“a standard device for dingbats of all ages.” (This is the same Judy Mann who earlier wrote, about Gennifer Flowers, “I’m getting tired of these women crawling out from under rocks, claiming they’ve had affairs with politicians.”)

Susan Faludi describes Lewinsky derisively as “sleeping her way to the bottom of the Revlon empire.”

Law professor Susan Estrich wrote in her America Online column, “Lewinsky at least appears to have flirted her way to a job at Revlon and, when that disappeared, a $2 million modeling offer and the status of the most-sought after woman in the world. Not bad, some might say, for someone who can’t type.”

They aren’t all sexist comments, but they’re nasty ones, empty of even a fleeting compassion. At the end of the Observer gathering, Erica Jong congratulated herself and her companions on their sisterly solidarity. “I think it’s a tribute to how far we’ve come that we’re not trashing Monica Lewinsky,” she remarked. A touching thought—but only if you had missed Jong’s earlier contribution to the discussion: “My dental hygienist pointed out that [Lewinsky] had third-stage gum disease.”

If feminists had stopped to think of Lewinsky as a real person, it might have slowed them down. “Look,” says Paglia, “everyone could see what kind of girl she was: she was not in control of herself. It’s so obvious, that she was this California girl who was dressing provocatively and was using her sex and so on. So what should be the response of the person in moral authority? It should have been ‘Well, this is very tempting, but it’s wrong for me to take advantage of my position here.’ ”

But feminists have an important stake in seeing Lewinsky as a competent young sexual adventuress: a portrait in avid consent. If there was consent, there was no victim; no victim, no problem.

“We’re not against sex; we’re against the use of sex to cajole, humiliate, coerce,” says Gloria Steinem. “But, according to what Lewinsky says, this was not the case with her…. We need to trust the women here. If we say a 21-to-24-year-old has no sexual will, we’re going against the whole struggle for self-determination and taking responsibility for our own lives.”

Anne Roiphe, the feminist writer and mother of Katie Roiphe, says, “I think that if this had not come to light, [Lewinsky] would treasure this for the rest of her life as a special thing that had happened to her in her early 20s.”

This is the most grotesque aspect of the feminist lapse here: this determination to depict Lewinsky’s end of the alleged affair as liberated, autonomous female sexuality in action, instead of as the pathetic picture it was, of a young woman seeking a dubious affirmation in all the wrong places. To be sure, the May-December romance is always a complex, two-way transaction. But what little we know of the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship suggests that in all of the specifics that matter—when he called, when and where they met, what they actually did with each other, and even when she was allowed to speak to him—the relationship was controlled (duh!) by the powerful, married, 50-ish man, not by the 20-something woman on the lowest rung of the status ladder.

Why do feminists find it so hard to acknowledge the ugliness of this arrangement? One reason is that Lewinsky’s age is a very touchy point: if you have argued for years against parental-consent laws for teenagers seeking abortions, you may feel hard-pressed to admit that many women in their early 20s are a few years shy of emotional maturity.

Another reason may be that Lewinsky is a potentially frightening mirror for her mother’s generation. Her eagerness to jump into the alleged affair, her apparent concept of herself as someone who could get power and self-esteem by having sexual affairs that she talked about widely, mark her as a clueless child of the sexual revolution. Feminism’s insistence that abolishing the sexual double standard was more important than anything else has led, at its worst, to a brittle, pitiless vision of sexual autonomy, in which anything goes and everyone can look after herself. “But that’s how you grow up,” says Wendy Kaminer. “You have a sexual relationship, and maybe you get a little used, and then you feel bad about yourself for a while, and then you grow up.”

At least Kaminer believes this argument. Among other feminists, the Lewinsky matter is strangely scrambling the trench warfare that has taken place for years between libertarian feminists such as Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe and those they accuse of being “victim feminists,” prone to infantilizing women by insisting on special protections against the depredations of mean old men. Paglia, for one, finds it hilarious that her views have so many new converts. “All of a sudden these people on the other side stampede to my side,” she says. “ ‘She should be allowed to do whatever she wants.’ They’re all libertarians all of a sudden!”

You’ve come a long way, baby: all the way to your knees.

Among the most honest women I interviewed for this piece was Marie C. Wilson, president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, who related her experiences, early in her career, as a lobbyist for liberal causes in the Iowa legislature. “I knew how to talk about the kinds of emissions standards I wanted for Iowa companies, and what kind of child-care standards I wanted for the children of Iowa, and Would you please move your hand? And most times I didn’t get the emissions standards or the child care. Now,” she says of Clinton’s presidency, “I’ve gotten emissions standards, and I’ve got better child care, and I’ve still got the hand. But that’s better than the other way.”

A very few women were willing to make this argument directly: that feminists could find some honor in making a dispassionate, tough-minded decision that Clinton’s value in office outweighs the sordidness of his personal life. But making this argument is something different from simply sweeping his behavior under the rug; it’s the pretense, above all, that does the damage.

And this is why the feminist failure matters. By wishing the problem away, feminists call into question one of their most important victories of the past decades: the hard-won consensus that men should not use social and economic power to recruit sex partners in the workplace, and that it’s fair for both sexes to expect limits on how much sexual relations are allowed to distort the system of rewards. I’m talking, here, not about feminist legislative achievements, but about a shift in the extralegal realm of mores, the shift that followed and ratified the actual laws against specific forms of sexual harassment.

Much social abrasion and anxiety went along with this shift, and much derisive complaining about the overreactions that uncertainty bred. But by and large it was a very healthy thing: a new social compact suggesting that behavior of the kind Clarence Thomas was said to have exhibited might or might not be a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but that in either case it is outside the bounds of acceptable behavior.

A helpful analogy might be the 1992 episode in which candidate Clinton played golf at a club that admitted only whites. The news was greeted with immediate outrage, not because it might have led to the repeal of the Voting Rights Act, but because the candidate’s choice of greens did an obvious violence to the social consensus forged by the civil-rights movement, that all Americans are entitled to at least the presumption that their countrymen will treat them as equals. Everyone recognized that violence instantly, and Clinton, with the belated sensitivity of self-preservation, apologized.

This is why even those feminists who were converted to indignation by Kathleen Willey are offering too little, too late. By acting as though Willey’s allegations are of an entirely different order from all the others that have dogged Clinton in the past, they define those others as none of our business. When the dust of Clinton’s presidency settles, the laws against sexual harassment will still be on the books. But the social sanctions against the behavior will be irretrievably damaged.

If you doubt this, look around. In the weeks that followed the Lewinsky scandal, those who had been most affronted by the awkward new social arrangements lately demanded of them shambled out of their caves to beat their chests. Conservative columnist John Leo, for example, crowed in U.S. News & World Report that the scandal was “probably the decade’s high-water mark of euphoria around the water cooler … a chance to break free from the office sex police.”

It’s all very well to protest that we shouldn’t look to our politicians as role models: the saga of Clinton’s sex life is being played out on too large a screen to ignore. You can say until you’re blue in the face that public men are entitled to a realm of privacy; that certain kinds of bad private behavior do not necessarily conflict with political competence, or even genius; and that adultery is not in itself of feminist concern. These are all irrelevancies. This mess is on our hands, and we do not have the luxury of arguing with its existence; the best we can do is call it what it is.

Finally, feminists have a special responsibility to loathe the lies, implicit and explicit, with which Clinton has consistently tried to cover his tracks: feminism, at its core, is about helping women to respect what is true over what is convenient. It’s bad enough that Clinton has hidden behind an endless chain of women to protect him from the consequences of his actions: from Betsey Wright, the longtime aide who contained “bimbo eruptions” for him in 1992, to Hillary and Chelsea—whistled home from Stanford, while classes were in session, to take part in a tender father-daughter photo op nine days after the scandal broke—to Betty Currie, the loyal secretary who will leave the Clinton White House with a mountain of legal bills. Must he hide behind the rest of us too?

When I look back over my life, I expect to remember Clinton’s two terms in the White House as the Gaslight Presidency. The 1944 version of Gaslight stars Charles Boyer as the sinister new husband of an innocent young woman played by Ingrid Bergman and named, as luck would have it, Paula. Boyer, who plans to do away with his wife, first plots to drive her crazy—or at least to convince her and the rest of the world that she has lost her mind. He does this by stealing little objects and then convincing her that she has lost them; by dimming the gas-fueled lamps and then telling her that she is imagining the waning of the light; by insisting, in sum, that she cannot trust the evidence of her own senses. “Paauula,” he is constantly crooning, with smarmy Latin concern. “You should lie down and rest for a little, Paauula.”

Because the movie was made half a century ago, it’s no surprise that Ingrid Bergman’s character is something of a doormat, sadly complicit in the manipulation of her own mind. But we have no such excuse.

Denial is insidious; it always claims more than you think you have ceded to it. “We would not be doing our job if we didn’t take into account that this president and his policies are crucial to the lives and welfare of the majority of women in this country,” Gloria Steinem assures me. “That’s not bending over backwards: that’s being sensible. Having said that, if Clinton had raped women, beaten up Hillary—real private sins would not be forgiven, no matter what the value of the public behavior.”

There it is, fellas, in case you’re still confused: it seems we just lowered the bar.

Marjorie Williams was a Vanity Fair contributing editor and a writer for The Washington Post. She died of cancer in January 2006 at the age of 47.

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